One of the things I submitted for Peertube to implement is responsive embeds (and I also provided the solution - the code). I am so happy to see it implemented and working in Peertube!

Oh and ofc you can follow my website via RSS or email too - all links here tiotrom.com/follow/

Federated, RSS, Email. All easy. All useful.

How beautiful to see the internet working this way. That's how it should be. My WP Website can connect to my social Profile (Friendica), and vice-versa. They all have RSS feeds too. Awesome!

I want to thank again to people like @Michael Vogel @Hypolite Petovan @Tobias and the like who work on Friendica. I love it and we talk about it (and the whole fediverse) in the upcoming TROM II documentary.

tio

2017-05-11 20:22:46

NEW BLOG POST:

Home

Read it on my website (recommended):

tiotrom.com/

Or read it here:

TIO

^TIO

I wrote a big post about AI :) and I also found a never before seen video with the latest meeting of the tech bros who are scared about AI -

TROM

2023-04-01 15:53:06

AI is ASS

NOTE: This post contains many images and text formatting, if you do not see this via our Friendica page then please use this link to read it fully social.trom.tf/display/dbc8dc4…

Back in 2015 I wrote a book for TROM about humans and the machines they have created. It is called the Human Machine and you can read it here.

Back then it was one of the first hypes about A.I. And as you may know by now, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence. Back then Google and Apple started to promote their AIs: Google Now and Siri. You could talk to these bots and they will provide you a lot of answers from many different domains. Ask how many dogs are in the world, ask them to set up an alarm for you, how's the weather, you name it. It would integrate with a lot of apps and devices.

People were asking these bots existential questions like what is the purpose of life:

I remember the Google supercomputers generating these weird images and the news outlets calling them "machines dreaming". Meaning, how machines dream:

And that Pepper robot that you could talk to...

These came after a few years of another hype: the self driving cars that were about to revolutionize transportation. In the book Automated Autonomous World that I wrote for TROM in 2013 , I partially fell for that hype and wrote in a very non-skeptical way about them.

To be fair with my past-self, I was focused entirely on how in a saner society the tech-part of the world could look like. So I presented many prototypes and unproven tech. I talked about how we have to change the infrastructure for these to work, and so forth. However, what I did not realized as deeply, was how misleading the world is. You see I naively thought that the big tech companies may not exaggerate as much about their tech. I sourced their own claims from their own engineers. But 10 years later I could say for sure that the vast majority of the tech I showcased in that book, was BS. For the most part at least. That means, the words that came out of the mouths of these engineers and "specialists" that work for these big companies, were mostly crap. Marketing.

That book may be removed from TROM when we do a cleanup this month in preparation for the upcoming TROM II documentary.

Back to AI.

In 2016 I started to be more and more aware of how the tech world is full of bullshit and bullshitters. For that reason I chose to present tech that was already there, working, and when it was just in testing phases I would present it as such and link to scientific papers about that tech.

When it came to AI I already smelled the bullshit. The stupid fear that AI will take over the world, and all of that crap. But I said let's educate myself. And so I said the best way is to understand a bit how these things work. I took several courses and read a bunch of stuff. I learned how AIs can categorize objects:

How it interprets text and speech:

I learned how facial recognition works:

I looked at how AIs learn to play games, drive cars, do science research.

Of course I only scratched the surface of these since they are complex. But I got a solid understanding I think. I realized that these are Statistical Software. Added with a bunch of filters and rules. They are complex, cool, interesting, but nothing WOW in terms of how they work. I learned that data and computer power is what makes the difference. I realized how non-magical these AI look when you have a clue about how they work. The end result is mesmerizing only for those who have a very dim understanding of these pieces of software.

I then talked about how they compared to humans. And of course the conclusion was that AI is just a complex set of statistical software with filters and rules and a lot of data, and has nothing to do with either artificial or intelligence (whatever that means).

Of course there are some applications for these pieces of software that I touched upon in the book, but mainly it was a grotesque hype.

Anthropomorphizing

That's a new word that I learned while writhing this book. It means "to ascribe human form or attributes to (an animal, plant, material object, etc.).". That's what AI are mostly.

The present.

7 years later and the AI "revolution" has resurfaced again. This time it seems even more mesmerizing, although not so much for me. I fee like I've seen this before...

ChatGPT and the like, Stable Diffusion, DALL·E, now they have different names and do similar things. They are fun to play with. Can create some weird images out of text, something I was showcasing in 2016 in another book about Language.

And the craze is starting again with people thinking these AIs will revolutionize the world, or will take over, and then no more jobs, no more artists, no more life. If you look again at how these work, they seem a lot less mesmerizing. The companies that push them use anthropomorphism to make them sound like they "think" and are like humans: neural nets, learning, hallucinating, and so forth. In fact they are still the same statistical machines that produce probabilities and that results in interesting outcomes.

Without going into specifics I recommend this funny video that explains the entire situation quite well: A.I. is B.S. ->>> ytb.trom.tf/watch?v=ro130m-f_y…

Also read through the sources of that video.

When I asked chatgpt about TROM I got this:

Which is not bad.
But when I asked who made TROM I got a very bad and totally wrong answer:

No idea who Catalin and Andrei are, but it is totally wrong. The project did not start as a research project, whatever the hell that means.

You see although it says some true things, it also says some entirely false things. Because this AI only knows how to put words together. Has no clue about anything else. And it will always produce well written sentences that can be totally wrong. Thus, this chatbot is entirely useless for factual information. And if you think it will get better and better, for one let's wait for that and then "hype" it, but second it may never be able to due to how it works (statistical prediction of what words go with what other words).

When I tell chatgpt that the project was not created by those two dudes, it invents new ones:

And so on it goes:

AI is ASS!

AI is actually Anthropomorphized Statistical Software, or ASS :)

We may find good uses for this ASS, maybe when they only rely on a main source of information like some specific research papers and provide exact quotes and sources. They are fun to play with for a bit tho. They may help us create more creative content or video/photo/audio effects. But "they" are as much as "they" as websites are "they". Depends what websites we are talking about. Same here, these ASS are diverse and made for a diverse set of purposes.

But what it is clear to me is that the HYPE is just that, a HYPE. Pushed by companies who want to make these ASS more appealing and sell them, by the bloggers and youtubers who jump on the hype train for clicks and views, by the media that does the same. Combine that with the fact that we live in a dumbed-down society where humans are just workers who have no time to learn/digest any of these things, and we are faced with an Idiotic society that has no clue about any of these.

Our trade based society is at fault here again, for incentivizing humans to hype these things all the time, in order to trade them. And for the fact that it keeps us all busy idiots for the sake of trading to survive. This has created a Land of Confusion.

Welcome to Earth.

#tromlive

a.i. is b.s.

A.I. is B.S.

SUPPORT ON PATREON: http://patreon.com/adamconover SEE ME LIVE ON TOUR: http://adamconover.net/tourdates VISIT USAFACTS: https://bit.ly/3TZyUK3 The real risk of A.I.

^{Adam Conover | Invidious}

My mother has a Samsung Galaxy J5 that she bought several years ago. The phone is in great condition physically. However it only has 16GB of internal storage. Problem is she uses 99% of that space, making the device extremely slow and 0 updates possible or the ability to install any new app.

So, we cannot uninstall/remove anything. Now what can she do? Buy a new phone probably.

And this is how you create a massive amount of waste. On these phones you have no control over your OS, so if your phone is a few years old you can say bye bye to system updates. You cannot remove the bloatware. You cannot change the battery or any other components. And yes probably you can do some of those if you have a ton of time and skills to install a custom Android and have the guts to unglue your phone and change the battery. But most people will never do this.

I tried to make the SD card of her phone part of the system to expand the storage. Worked. But then what for if I cannot move 99% of apps there? I then enabled the developer mode and enabled the "force move the apps to the SD card". That allowed me to move a bit more apps but still 80% cannot be moved.

However when these moved apps update, they are reinstalled on the internal storage again. Basically 'd have to move them to the SD card all the time....sucks. Not sustainable...

I eventually managed to install adbmanager and luckily that allowed me to remove any bloatware I wanted.

After doing all of these she has some 1.7GB of free space. Which is fine for now but still unsustainable. I wonder if the next Android update will add back all of that bloatware....after all when I got some updates years ago Samsung decided to install Facebook and Instagram for me, without the ability to remove them.

So, her laptop uses Linux and not Windows, despite having Windows pre-installed when we bought it. Why not install a sane Android OS on her phone?

With laptops is a ton easier, especially for older models, to install an OS. My mother could do it if I gave her the instructions. With the phones it is a different world. People are already googlefied so you can't just install a new Android without connecting it to their previous account since everything is tied to that. You need to root the phone and hope that it won't brick it. That's something that can make your phone useless. Plus all of these custom Androids that have removed the bloatware only support a tiny fraction of all phones.

LineageOS for example, the one that supports by far the most models - wiki.lineageos.org/devices/ - does not support that phone.

The rest support mostly the Pixel phones, namely the newer ones. And that's another issue...even these custom OSes will support this or that device for a bit, then bye bye. Therefore you still have to buy newer devices even when you want a custom Android that is bloatware free.

I was considering to compromise on buying a second hand but newer model Pixel and then install one of those bloatfree Androids, but then if you buy such a phone second hand and the battery is crap and you can't replace it....what can you do!?

Linux phones, if anyone wonders, are an experiment at best at this stage. Plus they only support a few models too.

It is such a different world when it comes to computers. This Microsoft tablet is more than 10 years old:

So you can bring to life old computers but not old phones.

That's one major reason why I hate smartphones. They are disposable. They come bloated with a ton of crap. It is hard if not impossible to block ads on phones. Plus they are with you all the time so notifications and all that crap will make your life a hell.

Even a Linux phone would not be something I would use much since I do not want to always be trapped in the digital space.

In this trade based society companies are incentivized to release newer model of phones constantly. They support each model for a few years then bye bye. They pre-install a lot of crap to make more off of you. Trades: attention, data, subscriptions. So we end up with a world full of disposable ad-devices that people call as "smartphones". The irony of using the word "smart" for those devices.

And I get it, these devices if they were Linux based only, and supported indefinitely, could be useful in certain circumstances such as navigation, keeping in touch with close friends, etc.. But the rest seems to me like just a tool for consuming, trading. Your life being sucked away from you by companies and individuals who want your currency, your attention, your data.

UGLY.

I will eventually install a custom Android on my own personal phone, a Galaxy S7, 8 years old. To put some life into it. Just so that I get rid of the pile of shit that the software is on all phones nowadays, even if I only use my phone for GPS, maps, and such purposes.

Yesterday I went to the dentist. I didn't have to go for the past 4 or so years so that's the positive side. I used to go there for 3 or so years almost weekly, not long ago, because I had braces. I had really fucked up teeth and it took 3 years to fix them.

Anyway, I go there and they tell me to wait in the waiting room. I enter and I see a few C's. Some young, some oldish. By C's I mean people. Why C? Because that's how they look to me, like the letter C when they sit down and are bent over their phone screens.

I remember not long ago when I was going to the same dentist, waiting in the same waiting room, that most people were just sitting around. They had some magazines there and some were picking them up and browsing through them.

So I sit down and look around like I normally do. I could see through a big glass door how strongly it is raining outside. It was pouring. My mind shifted to the TROM II documentary, the stuff that I want to do next, my plans for the next months, and so forth. My mind drifted towards the scenery for a bit and I was thinking how weird that this water falls from the sky and how it sounds....those rain droplets falling on the pavement make a lot of sound. And sound is basically energy. The atmosphere, the stuff around, shaking, and the vibrations reach our ears. How cool.

I remember waiting in this waiting room for many hours when I was going for my braces. And had a lot of thoughts. I like to think about stuff.

I then look around me and the C's are still C. I am thinking "Do they think that I am a weirdo...the only one here just sitting like that and not bent as a C? Am I more like an L when I sit down?" - but then I thought.....are these people even thinking about that? Or thinking in general?

Not to be mean, but it seems to me like pretty much everyone nowadays has no more "free time" to think. That time is completely eaten by the phones and the computers and the tv....

Honestly, does anyone nowadays have inner thoughts? Because even when you sit in your bed, before going to sleep, probably most humans are on their phones. They wake up with their phones in their faces too.

I was amusing myself thinking that in the near future people would go to a psychologist and be like...

Patient: I hear voices in my head!
Psychologist: What do they say?
Patient: idk....like words at times...
Psychologist: Do you hear them loud?
Patient: At times yes....
Psychologist: How often and when mostly?
Patient: Not that often, and usually when I do not do anything for some reason...
Psychologist: Ok, you may suffer from ITD.
Patient IDT?
Psychologist: Inner Thoughts Disorder. A lack of outside stimulation of the brain can cause the brain to shoot random thoughts. It is nothing to worry about. Back in the days people managed to deal with that on a daily basis. I recommend you these apps to keep your brain more engaged, and take one of these sleeping pills an hour before you want to go to bed.

That's how I was amusing myself.

You know, I used to spend at least 2-3 hours in bed before going to sleep, thinking about stuff. And it is damn fun. At times I would spend 5-6 hours or more, staying in bed, thinking. Actually this thinking time allowed me to create TROM, the documentary. The many books I wrote and projects I created. Heck yeah, this article was created last night while I was sitting in bed, in darkness, just with my brain. Now I too have reduced the night thinking to say 1-2 hours for some reason, but I still think every single night before I go to bed. :)

These moments of you inside your brain are, I think, essential to get to know yourself and the world around you. To plan ahead, to talk to yourself, understand yourself and your relationships. And the world that is out there. Without it you are like a Rumba cleaning robot. Or other sorts of robots. You observe and are pushed by the stuff you are observing. But have no time for self-reflection. Your brain is a read only software by you, and read and write for the big companies that are keeping you busy.

The same way that humans became physical robots for the past centuries, working 8 to 12 hours a day, same way today their minds are being trading assets. Facebook, Google, Netflix, TikTok and the like, they NEED your mind to trade. Your attention and data are so valuable today. So they do all they can to transform you into a livestock animal, milked daily, because that's all they want.

It is a very ugly society we live in. Driven by the same force of trade.

When the printing press was invented some said that humans won't even think because they will spend time reading other people's thoughts. Wasn't true really. Newspapers and the invention of the TV, others said, will make people dumber by keeping them glued to those media outlets. Not entirely true, but to some degree truer than before. The "smartphone" and the internet era is on a different level tho. They do keep people busy most of the time, because it is run by a cancerous invasion of companies and individuals who want BRAINS. Mindless consuming BRAINS. And you carry that consumption device with you non stop, and rely on it.

I too rely on a phone....to keep in touch with my parents and because they require one when you have a bank account, go to the hospital, the dentist, and so on. But I decided to only use the phone for that. And for the weather at times. Plus GPS. The rest I do not care. Although I spend a ton of time online, I do so only on my laptop. On my phone I rarely even have credit. And on my laptop I do a lot of work for TROM. Besides that I do scroll through reddit at times, but mostly I use our own tools like TROMnews, I watch documentaries and so forth.

But man.....this is a scary world for me. I see most humans as zombies who are not alive, but simply are automatons that are fed and milked non stop for an endless trade society.

And I genuinely wonder if people still have inner thoughts nowadays....what do they dream at night about....what do they think when they are not C's....? Are they L's, I's anymore? idk....

One thing I am 100% sure is that if I did not spend a lot of time with myself, in my head, I would have been lost today. It is what allowed me to get rid of my suicidal and depressive behavior, what allowed me to change, what made me make TROM, write books, make videos, and so forth. Without these, there is no me.

It's been almost a year since the war started. Here are my condensed thoughts.

1. It is only Russia's fault.

A bunch of talking heads say that US pushed Russia to invade, NATO bla bla bla. Does not matter if that's true, it is Russia who invaded Ukraine. They are dropping the bombs, they threw the first punch and keep on throwing more.

2. Russia has no excuses.

Russia is a nuclear weapons collector. They have the most numerous nuclear weapons in the world. Even if Ukraine joined NATO, even if Ukraine hosted some American nuclear weapons, it made 0 difference for Russia. No one is suicidal to ever attack Russia. For fucks-sake no one dares to attack North Korea because they have one and a half nuclear weapons...

So when Russia or others are blabbing about how they had no choices, that it is the Americans' fault for this, then this is pure nonsense of course.

3. The situation is very complicated.

Some say the world should keep on providing arms to Ukraine, some say this is terrible and only prolongs this war so more people will die, some say they should defeat Russia (now is the moment), some say Ukraine should accept some compromises and negotiate some peace talks....

4. The others are also big bullshitters.

On the other hand "the rest" are also complete idiots by thinking that Russia wants to take Ukraine, then the other tribes. Same way that no one dares to directly attack Russia, Russia cannot dare to attack any NATO members. It is pure suicide for both sides.

5. The profiteers.

6. USA and the rest are the opposite of saints.

USA; France, Germany and others, are supplying weapons to all sorts of dictatorial tribes around the world. They have killed, tortured, and destroyed a lot over the past decades. They are charlatans who pretend to care about Ukraine. Some might, but very likely they only follow their own interests. So fuck off with your superheroes attitude. You are not here to defeat the evil, you are here to prioritize only your own interests while sitting on the shoulders of dead and enslaved people.

7. The damaged ones.

8. I don't trust Ukraine.

The image of Ukraine, the heroes, I do not buy. I am sure there is some truth about what is being negatively said about them. Like them being influenced by the US, being engulfed in corruption, abusing in the past the areas that Russia occupied, that a bunch of people from those regions wanted to be part of Russia, especially in Crimea, and so forth.

9. Putin has failed.

If he was scared of Ukraine and how it was becoming a US puppet, and how they were getting new weapons and such, well...now Ukraine is even more a US puppet and has more weapons than they ever had. And they will get more. So, another failure.

If he wanted to push NATO further, then he achieved the opposite. NATO is closer and has more weapons now.

If he wanted to flex his muscles, he showcased that Russia has none.

All he achieved is dead people from both sides, destroyed homes and families, a worldwide hate on Russia; he isolated Russia in all regards, he showcased how badly prepared his army is, and made everyone look good and "come together" in this fakish fashion but one that made USA and Europe produce more arms, and ally against Russia.

10. The future is a constant suffering.

After all I am seeing, this war will drag for a long time. At best they get tired, exhausted, and will seek for a "peace deal" that may last for a bit of time, to then fight over those bordering regions again. Russia would love to destroy Ukraine, USA would love to drag Russia into a prolonged war.

It is an insane game that should not have existed in the first place.

I'll leave you with this image:

We know who we are, from a scientific perspective. But almost no one understands....humans, despite the vast amount of knowledge about the universe and us, are still living like "citizens". Patriots, workers, statuses....Zombies.